the intensifier

by techNET

the use of speed

Around 1988 the intensifier started going to illegal parties and
raves. Mostly happening in lost empty factories on the edges of
wastelands, people danced on burnt­up cars, tucked suspensions
moving in four­four time. The intensifier climbs over scaffolding.
Metal drumming against metal and fires shifting edges. Parties
could go anywhere. The intensifier loses it, then realises there
is nothing to lose. Lucid confusion. In night­empty cities,
a generation compose with speed, thinking/ feeling; uncertainty,
immensity, motion, forgetfulness, radiance, waste. Transformed
by moving fast, taking it all in at high velocity. The intensifier
dancing, hooded, grey, enwrapped in white smoke and light. The
intensifier moves, uses speed. Each party was the end of an era.
Something to take and use. Compose yourself. Move.

the rhythm versus the melody

The intensifier, grey against a dark sky, dancing, every bone
and bacteria in its body moving. Some things are taken and used
in devious, invisible, silent ways, uses neither determined nor
captured by the military-entertainment­surveillance industries
in which these things are designed, manufactured and marketed.
The intensifier dances, moves and transforms itself, insinuates
itself in the memories of users. The individual is a crowd, the
movement of incoherent and contradictory masses of social relations,
swarms of possibilities, endless immersions in space. The intensifier
dancing, grey and faceless. Wandering uses create an incoherent
and contradictory anti­discipline manifest in the intensifier,
grey against a dark sky, dancing. The intensifier insinuates itself
everywhere, moving, transforming, inspiring celebrations. The
intensifier combines rhythms and melodies, rhythm becomes melody
and melody becomes rhythm.

the art of deception

The intensifier has no identity, no ideology, has no cause for
desire to persuade. The intensifier senses the boundaries between
things, like when sound is loaded into a computer to be recoded
as a graphic and manipulated, combined, played with touch. Devious
and impossible to anticipate, subtle and insubstantial, the intensifier
leaves no trace. Mysterious and inaudible, no­one knows where
it is going. Pretending to stand still and accommodate itself
to the subliminal designs of corporate machines, the intensifier
knows speed and deception secretly free it from imposed values.

the space war

The intensifier uses sound as a cultural weapon, inspiring thousands
of simultaneous explosions on the borders between memory and loss.
Immersing bodies in unpredictable ways, sound enters in several
directions at once, producing internal connections and motions,
anticipating a desire to interact with others. Through this body/mind
motion a building is converted into a space of social­inspiration,
a space that can be changed, reversed, stretched, wasted, lost
or destroyed. The intensifier, fused to this psycho­social
energy, moves through a space­between.

the endless mix

The intensifier reads/writes about...the activity of listening
to music is a silent production...a drift across the sounds...a
metamorphosis of the music created by wandering ears...the listener
insinuates into the music the ruses of pleasure, manipulation,
combination, steals it, is transported into it, multiplies in
it...like the reverberations of stories stirring in a memory or
the internal rumblings of sounds moving through a body, this silent
production is an invention of memory...music is the outlet or
product of invisible histories...we listen to the landscape of
our memories...music is a movement of strata, a play of spaces,
the listener slips their own world into the music...like language
the forms of music are stolen by transients filling them with
forests of desires, metaphors of their own quests...the intensifier
understands that the listener is the operator, using the friendless
mix of sound in unforeseen ways...

the future of music

The intensifier moves on, keeps moving. There are
no rules. Genres cross fertilise constantly, mapping the
mutant subjectivities of dancers. Now half­way through another
decade, the intensifier isn't waiting for the next
new style to be re­discovered, only to be remembered
again as inherited identity. The intensifier is not
concerned with reaching an abstract audience, but
chooses to operate at an immediate level, making parties
and following desires. The intensifier, cut through by
collective activity, which is the basis of any culture,
moves against cults of the individual, attracting new vocabularies
that talk about the make­shift creativity of crowds. The
intensifier represents movements that anyone can use.